Interferometry refers to a family of techniques in which waves, usually electromagnetic, are superimposed in order to extract information about the waves. Interferometry is an important investigative technique in the fields of astronomy, fiber optics, engineering metrology, optical metrology, oceanography, seismology, chemistry, quantum mechanics, nuclear and particle physics, plasma physics, remote sensing, bimolecular interactions, surface profiling, microfluidics, mechanical stress/strain measurement, and velocimetry.
Certain devices used for optical interferometry, such as the non-limiting example of Fabry-Perot interferometers, produce light or fringe patterns. Fringe patterns are the result of the principle of superposition, in which waves are combined in a way that will cause the result of their combination to have some meaningful property that is diagnostic of the original state of the waves. Most interferometers use light or some other form of electromagnetic wave.
Historically, analyzing fringe patterns, fringe locations and consequently fringe shifts relied upon methods of focusing an image of the fringes onto a multi-pixel detector, such as a charge coupled device (CCD) or a complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) camera sensor, and analyzing the fringe patterns to determine their radius from the fringe center. This method can be computationally intensive, expensive, and time consuming. Historical analysis methods can also produce low signal-to-noise ratios thereby making signal lights harder to detect since in use the signal lights are divided among many detector pixels, each of which adds its own noise to that of the signal. As a consequence, interferometers have suffered in the commercial market because of their inability to provide real-time data of the frequency shifts.
It would be advantageous if the analysis of fringe patterns could be improved.